Field
The present invention relates generally to detecting tampering with the clock and/or supply voltage of a processor.
Background
A cryptographic computation of a computation system may be attacked by causing a temporary spike (or glitch) on a clock and/or power supply voltage to introduce faults into the computation results. Also, an attack may increase the clock frequency to sufficiently shorten a computation period such that the wrong value of an incomplete computation is sampled in the registers of the computation system. In addition, an attack may slow down the bus of the computation system to more easily attack the system.
There is therefore a need for a technique for detecting tampering with the clock and/or supply voltage of a processor in an efficient and cost-effective manner.